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SplashTop "Instant-On Linux" Gets Hacked

07-29-2008, 03:20 PM

Phoronix: SplashTop "Instant-On Linux" Gets Hacked

Last October we were the first to deliver a full-review of DeviceVM's SplashTop which was an instant-on embedded Linux distribution at the time found on a lone ASUS motherboard. Since then there has been a commitment to SplashTop on all ASUS motherboards and even on ASUS notebooks. While ASUS has been the primary partner with DeviceVM up to this point, other manufacturers are exploring this market. One of our few gripes about SplashTop is that it's limited in the current applications available and doesn't allow for much tweaking with no terminal access. However, members of the Phoronix Forums have hacked SplashTop. They have been able to run SplashTop from a USB stick on non-ASUS motherboards, boot SplashTop within a virtual machine, run custom applications, and launch a terminal within this proprietary Linux environment.

The article said that they have yet to release all the source code of SplashTop, if I understand correctly. How come they haven't released it yet on a CD or something, which you get when you buy the motherboard? Doesn't GPL state that you have to distribute the source code with the compiled code?

Comment

Basically you could replace the Xserver, but that would require much more space and of course would bootup longer. Then you can optimize your normal hd install with initng for example, get rid of any unused services and you are down to 10-15 seconds too on a fast hd. Counted only till X start, because the actual loading of Splashtop apps is not counted within 5 seconds.